Small citations
I have always been interested in the relationship between modern Chinese writers and Western classical music, and I have written some long and short studies before. Recently, there have been some new gains, so they have been re-written and shared with lovers of modern literature and classical music.
Lee Blonde and Don Hauser
"Light Rain", the first edition of Beijing Beixin Bookstore in November 1925
Li Jinfa (1900-1976) was the founder of modern Symbolist poetry in China, and rose to prominence in the new poetry scene with three new poetry collections, "Light Rain", "Song for Happiness", and "Diners and Murderous Years", and won the title of "Poetry Monster". Don Hauser (also translated as DonHauser) was an opera by the great German musician Richard Wagner (1813-1883). The two seem to be incompatible, how can they be linked?
It turned out that Li Jinfa had written a poem "Tang Haoser". The poem was included in his first collection of poems, "Micro Rain" (the first edition of the Beijing Beixin Bookstore in November 1925, listed as the eighth type of the "New Wave Society Literary and Art Series" edited by Zhou Zuoren), entitled "Tanh user (the tragedy of Wagner)" (in the first edition of "Light Rain" Wagner mistakenly printed as woguer, hereinafter referred to as "Tang Hauser" poem). The poems in "Light Rain", except for a few three or four poems that were first published in "Language Silk" and "Current Affairs New Newspaper And Learning Lantern", were mostly published for the first time, and this "Tang Hauser" poem was no exception. The poem is not long, but is reproduced as follows:
A few years ago the psalmist wanted to kill God,
A few years later God killed the poet.
He played music at the banquet,
Several were stabbed to death by swords.
The light moon dimly,
The night sneaker is coming:
The Flute of the Barefoot Shepherd,
In and out with the song boy in the yellow leaves.
The poet thinks: Whose favor should be reported,
But the harpe is both broken, whatever!
Just such a short poem, only five verses, only two sentences per verse, a total of only eighty words, but in the language of a unique poem, the author's perception of the opera "Don Hauser" is written. Wagner's work, written at the age of thirty-two, is his third more mature opera after Le Enzi and The Wandering Dutchman, writing about the court poet Don Hauser, who, as an ordinary commoner, destroys social customs and falls in love with the count's niece. The opera attempts to reveal that the "human mind" is "the main battlefield between flesh and spirit, hell and heaven, Satan and God" (Baudelaire), that its music is "the most beautiful and best melody of its time", that its presentation of sensory and religious oppositions is "concise and detailed" (U. De Luna: A Biography of Wagner, August 2021 edition), and even that some researchers argue that "Don Hauser is actually more like telling the mysterious story of Wagner himself" (C. Tillermann: My Wagner Life, Guangxi Normal University Press, January 2019).
A little comparison shows that the verse in this poem, "He played music at the banquet, / Several times stabbed to death by a sword", is exactly the scene in the second act of the opera, which shows that Li Jinfa did watch this opera. However, when and where Li Jinfa watched the opera "Don Hauser" is difficult to check. Li Jinfa went to France to study in the winter of 1919, began to write new poems in the autumn of 1920, entered the National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris in the autumn of 1921, and went to Berlin, Germany, to study in the winter of 1922. During this time, it is impossible to confirm whether he watched "Don Hauser" in Paris or Berlin. Some of the poems in "Light Rain" indicate the year of writing at the end, but the poem "Tang Hauser" does not, so it is impossible to confirm when the poem was written. But from the title and verse of the poem, Li Jinfa's poem Wagner's "Don Hauser" is unmistakable.
Of course, the poem "Don Hauser" is not remarkable in "Light Rain". Thirty-five years ago, Mr. Sun Yushi of Peking University compiled the "Selected Poems of symbolism" (People's Literature Publishing House, August 1986 edition), which justified the name of "symbolism", Li Jinfa not only placed it at the beginning of the volume, but also selected as many as twenty-four poems in "Light Rain", the famous "Abandoned Woman", "Lyon In the Car", "Fantasy", "Feeling", etc., but the poem "Tang Hauser" was not selected, so it can be seen that this poem did not enter Mr. Sun's legal eyes, and later Li Jinfa researchers also mostly ignored this poem. But for China's history of Wagner's reception, the poem is not optional. In the poems of Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, Xu Zhimo, Feng Zikai and other writers, it is gratifying to write about Wagner, and to introduce Wagner to the new literary writers of the Chinese people, another Li Jinfa. Interestingly, Li Jinfa and Yu Dafu both wrote "Don Hauser", which can be described as coincidental, but Yu Dafu wrote novels ("Silver Gray Death"), while Li Jinfa wrote poetry.
The young lord praises the classical music masters
"The Poetry Piano Sounds", the first edition of the Commercial Press in May 1931
Qing Lord, also known as Li Qing Lord (1893-1959). People know this name, generally because he is a composer, music aesthetician and foreign literary researcher, and the famous art songs "The Great River Goes East" and "I Live in the Head of the Yangtze River" that have been selected as "Chinese Music Classics of the Twentieth Century" are from his handwriting.
However, few people know that Qing Lord is also a new poet, and has published a collection of poems, "The Poetry Piano Sounds". The cover of the book is signed Qingzhuo, and the title page is signed Li Qingjue, and in May 1931, the commercial press first published, listed as the first in the "National Conservatory of Music Series". At that time, at the invitation of his old classmate Xiao Youmei, he was editing a music journal at the National Conservatory of Music, where Xiao was the principal. Xiao Youmei wrote a prologue to this purpose, "The Poetry Of the National Conservatory of Music", pointing out: "My friend Dr. Qingzhuo is a poet who can compose music, and his poems, whether they belong to the Gothic, Heine school, or the latest Expressionism, are written according to the proper recitation method. "The poem in 'The Piano Sounds' is a poem that the capital can sing." This reveals the artistic characteristics of The Young Lord's only new collection of poems.
However, I am more interested in the chants of the young lords to Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and other classical music masters in "The Poetry Is Sounding". Qing Lord studied in Germany, and the German lady HuaLisi originally studied music, so it is not surprising that he is obsessed with classical music. It was just that he wrote new poems again and again to show respect for Beethoven and others, which still made me feel a surprise.
There are two poems in the book, one long and one short, one each for Mozart and Wagner. One of the long poems that Xiao Youmei appreciated was "Beethoven", and it was recorded as follows:
You, the king of art who ruled the nineteenth century,
You have taken all my respect, my fantasies and hopes.
You are the only god I believe in the most,
Your work is my Bible.
You lead me to fight against the world of sin,
You encourage me to improve sinful humanity.
I hear my cries and cheers from your music,
I was a hundred times more courageous and completely forgot about my toil.
You show me a direction to work towards:
Move the heavens of Fowler above the world.
My hearts are pounding, my heart is pounding,
My heart exploded, and I laughed out loud,
Looking up, I saw only one of the most sacred stars,
Illuminate the world with a growing light.
The short "Sinfonia" is concise and chic, and it is actually a praise for Beethoven's great "Ninth Symphony", and the young lord should be one of the earliest people in China to listen to the entire "Ninth Symphony":
Boiling Hall;
Complicated A;
Hot international language.
Suddenly, there was a silence that captured the sound——
The gods of the heavens are descending,
I ascended to heaven.
Berlin
Philharmonic
Divine 9. Sinfonia.
For Mozart, the young master wrote "Mozart's Quartet". He had a soft spot for Mozart's string quartet, a long poem with ten stanzas and forty lines. "The laughter of the four strings / Making many scenes, / Gradually shaking my heartstrings, / Playing a harmonious silence." In the language of brilliant poetry, he vividly describes the scene and reverie of listening to the charming Mozart.
As for Wagner's "Richard Wagner", which is as gorgeous and majestic as Wagner's music, quite imposing, and quite insightful, it can be called the empty valley foot tone at that time, so the whole poem is recorded:
Beethoven knocked on the door of the Upper Realm: /"Listen! There is music in the world! "/ The gods have just heard it, / The music of the Netherworld is no longer composed.
Since Beethoven, / Who can match your greatness? / You have completed Beethoven's unfinished business, / And you have opened up a new art world.
You raise your rough fist, / Smash the delicate poetry into pieces; / In your mind / How did there ever exist in music?
Your artistic drama, / Mixing poetry and music. / The future art of solipsism / The discovery of only the leaves and leaves.
O Wagner, your stereo, / Such a heavy, such a happy, / All the instruments, the whole team of singers / It turns out to be your vocal cords and trachea.
Grow up in you, sing solo in the sky, / sing through the loneliness of the netherworld. / The god who looks at everything / Only then do I believe that there is music in the world.
Wang Mingzhu's "To Chopard"
Selected Poems of Modern China, Chongqing Southern Press, July 1942
Sun Wang and Chang Renxia co-edited the book "Selected Poems of Modern China" (Chongqing Southern Press, July 1942 edition), and selected a poem by Wang Mingzhu's "To Xiao Bang", which is worth mentioning.
Wang Mingzhu (1907-1989) and his people, who understand the history of New Chinese poetry, should not be unfamiliar. He is the publisher and lead author of the Nanjing "Modernist" new poetry journal Shifan, born in September 1934, and his poems are interwoven with the charm of "neoclassic" and the interest of "new feelings", including the new poetry collection "Self-Portrait" and "Jide and Butterfly". Wang Mingzhu later went to Taiwan, where he reprinted his masterpiece "Ji De and the Butterfly".
Originally published in June 1941 in Guiyang,Guiyang Chinese Poetry, No. 2, "To Chopin" is a long poem of ten stanzas, three lines per section, for a total of thirty lines, which is brilliantly written and reproduced as follows:
In Warsaw, the whole day is melancholy, reliving the glory of the past / Poland, turning the pages of history, Poland has a / dead stubborn soul, how to become a silent country?
Shout, write, tell future generations, let the world see: / Not with a pen, not with a gun (though once you wished / Died on the spear of the invaders), but in black and white keys.
In Paris in 1831, hundreds of constellations floated:/ Hewen held up a colored pen soaked in honey and bile, / Wearing a vermilion vest, Muse was singing the song of lingxiu.
In addition, there is a long list of resounding names such as Lamartine, Melimé, Baudelaire, Saint-Pévey, Vie, /Gautier, Chateaubriand, Hugo. / You are dazzled by these many stars, and frightened by their flirtatious laughter.
In a breath of preparation to fly away, send eighteen years of Chiao years, / spend here. And the woman with the black eyes,-Georgesan/more pretended to be your life, added some to you, ruined some.
The flies of the market will laugh at your boneless hands: but how beautiful, it is two soft wings. When its swim support/one-third keyboard, the elephant snake cracks its mouth and swallows a cunning rabbit.
It was a delicate crystal ball that landed on fiery red velvet. Elephant lizard / Years of fickleness, is the strong accent that flows from your fingers; / And soft, that is, the whisper that makes people lose their souls.
It's as if we hear dew ticking, the wind is pounding, / There are ghosts, there are soaring flames, there are fierce winds that roll up the ground, / There are small silver horseshoes, and the boulevards are opened...
O goddess of the piano, we are confused / In the fog of your scale, we see Poland even more, / Poland bursts out of the mud.
However, today, just over a hundred years after your death, your mother is called /European hooligan hanging. Poland, / Will you forever become the tomb of an ancient emperor, only for people to hang?
"To Chopard" is like a biography of the piano poet Chopard's poems. Chopard came to Paris in 1831, lived and wrote in Paris, traveled and fell in love, and died in Paris eighteen years later, all written in this poem. I don't know how much Wang Mingzhu listened to Chopard's piano music, but he used vivid metaphors and strange imaginations in his poems to praise Chopard's piano creation and performance. What is particularly rare is that when he praised Chopin, Chopin's motherland of Poland had been occupied by German invaders, the verse "but called the European hooligans hanged to death" is a powerful indictment of the fascists who started world war II, which makes this poem even more tragic.
As far as I can see, there are not many modern Chinese writers who have written poems for Chopin, except that Feng Zikai introduced the "mournful musician" Xiao Bang in "The World's Great Musicians and Famous Songs" (Shanghai Yadong Library, May 1931 edition), and Xu Zhimo also used "Chopin's 'Nocturne'" in his famous essay "Chopin's 'Nocturne'" as a metaphor for the buildings on both sides of the Cambridge Kang River "a clear and beautiful artistic mood that is out of dust", Liu Rong'en is of course also one, he wrote a poem "Nocturne in E" minor（Chopin,op.72）》。 Wang Mingzhu is probably the fourth, isn't it not difficult to be precious?
Qian Wanxuan's "Music of Winter"
The inaugural issue of Qiushi Monthly
In April 1944, the comprehensive literary and historical journal Qiushi Monthly was founded in Nanjing, with long Muxun (Long Yusheng), a lexicographer, as the president and the famous ji guo'an (fruit factory) as the editor-in-chief. Zhitang's "One Dream" and Zheng Bingshan's "Chinese Painting and Western Painting" published in the inaugural issue are readable. But what piqued my greater interest was "Music of Winter", which was signed by Qian Wanxuan.
At the beginning of this article, the author tells the reader: "Mr. Fruit Factory specified the title and asked me to write a piece of "The Music of Winter". It turned out that this article was a propositional essay. Why the editor-in-chief ordered the author to write this article, presumably because he thought that the author understood music and was good at writing. Sure enough, the author entered the topic and quoted:
Music is the "art of time", and the way it is performed and the attitude of appreciation may be influenced by the seasons. The new year of the solar calendar is in winter, and the famous book "Song of the Four Seasons" by the English poet Thomson is headed by "Winter". In ancient China, there was a saying that the law was used according to the month, and the week was headed by the November of the summer calendar, so the "Book of Rites and Months" used the yellow bell with November, and the great Lu with December. In this way, "Winter Music" can be counted as standard music.
Of course, winter is not necessarily an ideal time to play music. The article cites the Russian pianist "Lupinstein" (Rubenstein) who visited the United States and refused to play because of the harsh climate, although he was well paid. Of course, there are also "musicians who are not afraid of the cold, only afraid of the heat", "Le Sheng" Beethoven played the piano for a long time, his fingers will be hot, so he often put a basin of cold water next to the piano, and when his fingers play heat, they are immersed in the water to cool down; but once the water spilled into the bed of the downstairs resident and quarreled, and immediately moved away in anger. Such vivid and interesting details, will it be written in various Beethoven biographies? The author believes that Beethoven's "music is also as fearsome as summer, but in winter, it is enough to increase people's heating."
The most attractive thing about "Winter Music" is the combing of the history of Western classical music from the perspective of "Winter":
There are many great composers born in winter, such as Khandel, Möchat, Beethoven, Soban (Chopin), Mendelssohn, Bailey Wotz (Berlioz), Weber and other classical and romantic masters, all born in winter. However, these composers do not seem to have the character of winter, and the music with winter as the theme is rarely heard; it is only because the artists prefer spring flowers and autumn moons, or are emotionally prone to sad spring and autumn, and forget the winter wind and snow, right? As far as I know, the music of winter, Tchaikovsky's first symphony "Winter Dream", is unfortunately not a successful work, and when Chai took it to Lupinstein, he was greatly criticized by Lu. Hungarian pianist and conductor Alphons Czibulka's sketch "The Story of Winter" is a popular piano piece with a sense of twilight in its affectionate and gentle tone, reminiscent of Shakespeare's legendary play "The Story of Winter" in his later years.
The author successively cites the "Winter" in the British composer Alec Rowley's "Four Seasons", and the "Two Songs "Winter" in the Romantic composer Schumann's "Youth Collection of Works Sixty-seventh", and praises the former for "making the human body feel warm comfort" and the latter "writing the sad mood of winter". The author further points out that "the most touching music of winter is perhaps the song master Schubert's collection Winterreise (winter journey"), and devotes considerable space to the lyrics of this famous vocal suite (the poem of the German Romantic poet Miller) one by one, with soothing and intestinal writing, and finally concludes: "These twenty-four songs have a consistent sentimental tone, describing the frustrated wanderers who long for spring in the winter journey. Spring is coming, but the wanderer's last hope has been extinguished along with the remnants of the tree. ”
The only regrettable thing is that this article fails to mention Vivaldi's "Winter" in the popular "Four Seasons", which should be because Vivaldi has not yet entered China at that time (Vivaldi was once forgotten, silent for more than two hundred years, and was not rediscovered until after the 1940s), and the author does not know why, there is no need to be demanding.
Qian Wanxuan's "Music of Winter" is unique, but the author's name is a bit strange, who is he? It turned out to be Qian Renkang's (1914-2013) pen name. It is no wonder that Qian is a famous musicologist and music theorist. Unfortunately, I read this article too late and had no reason to ask for advice.
Fang Ping yong Stradivarian
"Gone with the Wind", the first edition of Shanghai Constellation Publishing Company in October 1947
The name Fang Ping (1921-2008) should not be unfamiliar to those familiar with the history of foreign literary translation. He was the son-in-law of the translator Shao Xunmei, who had translated Shakespeare, Madame Browning, Emily Brontë, and others, and co-translated Boccaccio's Decameron. It should be mentioned that he was the first Shakespearean translator to use Shakespeare as the basis of the stage. However, Fang Ping published a new collection of poems "Gone with the Wind" in the early days, which is probably little known.
"Gone with the Wind" is Fang Ping's only new collection of poems, which was first published by Shanghai Xingqun Publishing Company in October 1947 and listed as one of the "Creation Poetry Series" of the Poetry Creation Society, and the editor-in-chief of the poetry series is the famous poet Zang Kejia. The main text of this collection of poems is thirty-two pages, plus two pages of Zang preface, and a thin one-volume booklet. The whole book is divided into two series, a total of only eleven poems, "Go with the Wind", "Skylight", "One Day", "Angry", etc. are all written for the times, with feelings and hair, unique, no wonder Zang Kejia commented in the preface:
Fang Ping's poem requires a little patience to read it, like a deeply hidden person, not cooled by his calm appearance, so that you can finally get something from him. His poems, not just to make people taste the bitterness of itself, a line of sentences like a deep winding path, leading you to climb step by step to the peak of his feelings, when writing them, he cut thorns in the spiritual realm, picked up and put down, he refused to call a little floating in the essence, he was very cynical, he was old and new and old, he laid out his irony, the way of laying out words, not even accustomed to our eyes. He is accustomed to thinking about the meaning of life, and he gives these poetic images...
However, "Go with the Wind" also has "Cantonese Music", "Lullaby", "Symphonic Music", "Violin" and other poems, all related to music, the last three are more directly related to Western classical music, which is rare in new poetry collections, only Qing Lord's "Poetry Piano Rings" and the new poetry collection of Liu Rongen I introduced before can be compared, which shows that Fang Ping is a lover of Chinese and foreign music, especially classical music. He described Cantonese music as "only like a light dream clasping a light dream / The emptiness in the dream, and illuminating you / Saying that the intoxication of self-pity is not exhausted", and he also likens the Western symphony to "the wish of the tacit understanding between the stars and the stars -/ It is to trace the tides of light and shadow, and the pattern of the shell is printed -/ It is to praise the wisps of flowers one hill and one valley and one universe", all of which are unique ingenuity. And I was surprised by the following "Violin":
Ah, into your hand, place the vessel
Once in your hands, then for the first time
We opened our eyes and thoughts,
Suddenly entering, a dream that has never been approached before.
Angels in the clouds, daffodils serving the God of love,
Shallow milky way, desert space, weaver girl's trembling,
Everything is wonderful; yet everything
It's just real, the four thin strings from the lynx.
Stradivarius – the treasure of the world,
If not you had sacrificed the enormity of your life
In order to give in a flash of flowing water
Such majestic, such eloquent praise,
The words of the elephant singer to himself;
Will be restored: a few pieces of wood that are silent.
The poem is actually a valuable Italian Stradivari violin, and the author at the end of the poem has a finishing note:
"Stella Di Vanlios" is the violin made by the greatest violin maker, he was born in Italy in the seventeenth century, the name is "Stella Di Varli".
Stradivari, now translated stradivari, is a violin maker family in Cremona, northern Italy, the most famous of which was Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), also known as Fang Ping Yongsong. The Violin is a gem in the world of violins, and for centuries generations of outstanding violinists in the West have prided themselves on having a Stradivarian that produces a beautiful sound. However, they probably did not expect that in 1947 in China, there was a poet who praised Stradivari with an enthusiastic poem, and this poet's name was Fang Ping.
Liu Rong'en's classical music poems
Six Kinds of Liu Rong'en's Collected Poems, China Social Science Press, November 2021
On New Year's Day, "Six Kinds of Liu Rong'en's Collected Poems" (edited by Liu Fuchun, China Social Science Press, November 2021 edition), Liu Rong'en's new poetry creation and the karma of Western classical music have been newly and completely presented.
Liu Rong'en (1908-2001) was versatile, writing new poems, translating, and painting, and achieving the greatest achievements with new poems. Before he went to England in 1948, he printed six new collections of poems at his own expense in Tianjin, each with only 100 copies. His poems are neither published in newspapers nor published by publishing houses, but are all self-printed, "to give my friends of the same temperament a casual look, not for sale" (Liu Rong'en's letter to Liu Fuchun on February 7, 1984), which is unique in the history of new Chinese poetry. In the six new poetry collections, the original "Liu Rong'en Poetry Collection" and "Eighty Sonnets" have no poems directly related to Western classical music, but they have been revealed, and the sentence "I am willing to music, wind, birds, to wet my eyes" in "Ode to Melancholy" (one of Liu Rong'en's poetry collections) can prove Liu Rongen's love for music.
In the three collections of poems since then, Liu Rongen's fascination with classical music has been fully demonstrated. The 1944 Fifty-Five Poems include Three poems: Saddolfin: The Ninth Symphony, MOTO PERPETUO, and The Story of the Veena Forest, and in the 1945 Poems II, there are nocturne in E Minor (Chopin, op.72), Franz Drdla: Souvenir, and Stars (writing the French Marseillaise), and in the three collections of poems of the same year, there are also "Round Dance" and "Tchaikowsky" : Symphony No.4", "Sonata in F. Minor", and "Mozza thito Symphony". In this way, Liu Rong'en's classical music poems totaled ten, which is second to none among china's modern new poets.
I have commented on Liu Rong'en's classical music poems before (see Liu Rong'en: A New Poet Obsessed with Classical Music, included in the first edition of Tianjin Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House in August 2014, Symphony on Paper; Liu Rong'en Yong Beethoven, published in the February 2012 issue of Book City), but there are still omissions that should be added. Let's start with this song "MOTO RETPETUO":
I've grown leaves, I've blossomed,
Now I'm dry:
The wind blows on the body,
Watch my meaningless shake.
Winter has gray hair,
It is already dusk in the morning;
Pale silver sunset,
From the verses alone, it seems to have nothing to do with classical music, the key is in the poem title, the poem title is Italian, meaning "infinite movement". In Western classical music, this is an instrumental title, which is often a fast and repetitive sound pattern throughout, the most famous of which is the famous Italian violinist and composer Paganini (N. Paganini's concert Allegro Infinite Motion, which is also available in Mendelssohn, John Strauss, and others. And Liu Rongen has obviously heard of this kind of "infinite movement" works, triggering inspiration, borrowing leaves to flourish and wither, and metabolizing at four o'clock to secretly transmit the time and life experience of "infinite movement", which is quite chic.
Another poem, "The Story of the Forest of Veena", is, of course, the famous work of John Strauss, the "King of the Round Dance", and the whole poem is as follows:
Musician, play "The Story of the Forest of Viena" again
Veena's beads caught the ghost in the morning forest.
It is in the sheet music to delight the hearts of the aliens.
In a Chinese café, "The Story of the Forest of Viena"
Flapping up the wings, the sound of the forest scattered,
At dusk and in silence, endless stories are told.
Go to hide from the autumn rain, ask for tea, go to listen to the "forest story",
No, not the sweetness of the sheet music, I know—
It's you, or the forest story is a coke jungle.
Of all of Liu Rong'en's classical music poems, this one is the most realistic, and the writer listens to the musicians' feelings and associations when they play this tireless round dance song in a café in Tianjin. The emphasis on "in The Chinese Café" in the poem is remarkable, on the one hand, it corresponds to the "Vienna Woods Story" from the West, on the other hand, it may also indirectly express the small resistance to the Japanese invasion and the fall of Tianjin, as he himself said: "In the past eight years, this little voice has not also cried for ordinary people." (November 16, 1946 to Wei Yu's "Book Brief")